Monday, October 13, 2014

Issue one of ART DECADES will be out later this week. It will initially appear for order on our Createspace page and then over at Amazon. Our first issue ran much longer than expected so the price is a bit higher than we wanted it to be. Because of this we are going to wait until Issue 2 to go with expanded distribution to keep the price as low as possible. Future issues will be both cheaper (in the fifteen dollar range) and shorter (around 100 pages). Kelley, Whitley and I are super proud of the issue though and we hope everyone enjoys it. Putting together our first printed publication, with no previous experience, was a challenge to say the least but the numerous problems we faced will only make our upcoming issues all the better. Here are a few details regarding Issue 1 and a few subscription/fan club opportunities for those interested. Thanks to everyone for all the support...what a wild ride this has been!

Monday, September 8, 2014

Most moviegoers back in the early eighties wouldn't have have
blinked an eye at the casting but, for those in the know, Sharon
Mitchell's brief bit as "2nd Nurse" in William Lustig's ferocious
1980 masterpiece Maniac was a small but significant milestone for the both of
them. The New Jersey native Mitchell was just shy of a year younger
than the Bronx bread Lustig when they first met during a New York
casting session in early 1977. The close proximity of their ages wasn't
all Mitchell and Lustig had in common during that first fateful
meeting. They were both hungry (literally and figuratively) and
struggling to make a name for themselves in the electric, and sometimes
insane, world of film in the New York cinema in the seventies. Just
past twenty in 1977, Mitchell was smart, feisty, lovely to look at and a
junkie. A former N.Y.U. film student, Lustig had a very small pot to
piss in at the time but he had managed to find a small handful of
investors in that sweltering summer of 77 to fund what would turn out to
be his first feature as a director and Mitchell was his ideal, if
surprising, leading lady. Inexperience and youth be damned, the two
were an perfect team and the little film they made together, The Violation
of Claudia, would help launch two extraordinary and wild careers that
would be as unpredictable as they were influential. New York in
1977...a year of blackouts, Berkowitz and Billy 'fuckin' Bagg.

Written, edited and directed by William Lustig under the pseudonym Billy
Bagg in just a few days for a measly budget even the most seasoned
filmmakers could have barely cut a trailer on, The Violation of Claudia
is a shockingly well made and effective feature. An adult take on
Bunuel's 1967 stunner Belle de Jour, Lustig's first film is a
fascinating hour long time sex film that is both erotic and witty.
Label it exploitation but it is intellectually driven exploitation
crafted by a man clearly immersed in film history and captivated by all
things cinema.

Dealing with sexual repression in an openly sexual arena, The Violation
of Claudia would be an essential entry in William Lustig's filmography
even if it wasn't his first feature. What could have been a by the
numbers quickie becomes a truly rewarding and satisfying experience.
You can sense Lustig's creativity and drive in every shot of The
Violation of Claudia. For a film shot so quickly by an artist so young,
there is a real clarity and fluidity in the direction of The Violation
of Claudia and Sharon Mitchell's performance as the frustrated title
character is really quite wonderful. Had she been around in Hollywood's
Golden Age, Mitchell could have been a real contender, a Myrna Loy with
a 'fuck me' smile. Sharon Mitchell is more than a good actress, she is
a unique one and her work in The Violation of Claudia is both endearing
and surprisingly touching.

Mitchell isn't the only on-screen powerhouse appearing in The Violation
of Claudia. The mighty Jamie Gillis turns in a typically strong
supporting turn and the legendary Long Jeanne Silver also makes a brief,
but memorable, appearance.

Distribpix's new special edition of The Violation of Claudia is another
grand slam. Paired with Lustig's second feature, Hot Honey (post coming
soon), The Violation of Claudia has never looked or sounded better and
the extras Distribpix have assembled include the original trailer, a
slideshow of vintage articles, clippings and pictures and a terrific hour long
podcast featuring Lustig talking about his background and films with Distribpix's Steven Morowitz. The
best extra is the incredibly informative and entertaining
commentary track featuring Lustig and the extraordinary Nicolas Winding
Refn. Recorded while Refn was filming Drive, the commentary track alone
makes this one of the great releases of this now not so young year.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Before he electrified audiences with his legendary Maniac, filmmaker William Lustig shot two underground New York classics under the name Billy Bagg, The Violation of Claudia andHot Honey. These long hard to see features, starring the likes of Sharon Mitchell, Jamie Gillis, Long Jeanne Silver and Serena, have been finally restored by the great folks at Distribpix and they are getting ready to come out on DVD via a brand new special edition set. Special features include trailers, slideshows and best of all new audio commentaries with Lustig and Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn! This collection promises to be one of the essential releases of the year. More info can be found here.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

An incredibly entertaining, and compulsively readable, book from journalist and former Hustler editor Mike "McBeardo" McPadden, Heavy Metal Movies is the newest epic tome from the great folks over at Bazillion Points and it is another knock out of the park. Coming in at well over 500 pages, this massive tribute to the sometimes surprising connections between films and heavy metal comes with the fitting tagline, "Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear-And Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever!" and it more than lives up to that ambitious promise.
Brooklyn born McPadden worked for years researching and writing Heavy Metal Movies and the effort paid off as this is one of the most entertaining and exhaustive books on film in recent memory. Far from an overtly serious or critical guide, Heavy Metal Movies is a wonderfully humorous and witty work that is as engaging as many of the wild cult and exploitation films it covers. While McPadden's style is breezy and personal, make no mistake this is a guy who knows his stuff and many of the connections he makes in Heavy Metal Movies are both eye-opening and unexpected.
Featuring hundreds of black white images, with a very striking color section, the layout of Heavy Metal Movies is a simple, but effective, A to Z listing of the 666 films that in some way or another have a connection to Heavy Metal music. The connections range from the very subtle to extremely strong and while some of McPadden's choices might seem odd his reasoning is almost always sound. While the tales of musicians who have been influenced by specific films are fascinating what I really like about the book is McPadden's way of making the reader perhaps look at a film they thought they knew as well as possible in a slightly different way. That said, the one flaw the book has is that it is at times a bit too far reaching on certain titles (should something like Jawbreaker be included just because "Rock Me Like a Hurricane" is featured) but that's a very small complaint as this is a very pleasing book that a lot of obvious love and work was put into.
Heavy Metal Movies also includes a lively introduction by McPadden, Alice Cooper discussing his favorite 'Metal' film and some audacious lists focusing on things like the most Metal moments in movie history. Order it directly from Bazillion Points and get a limited color sewn patch (that you can slap on your cut off jean jacket next to your Iron Maiden and Angel Witch logos). Copies can also be obtained from Amazon and other online retailers.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

After years of being passed thru the hands of collectors via poor quality grey-market copies, one of the seventies greatest films has finally been granted an official home video release in The United States. Alain Robbe-Grillet's fourth feature film as a director, and his first color production, "L'éden et après" (Eden and After) can now finally be enjoyed by American audiences via a striking Blu-ray from Redemption and Kino Lorber. Mastered from the original 35mm elements, Redemption's new Blu-ray is absolutely dazzling and Robbe-Grillet's astonishing and bold use of color is serviced perfectly on this important new release. Robbe-Grillet admits on the thirty minute interview that graces the disc's supplements that he didn't have a script going into production of Eden and After and, astonishingly, the brilliant lead actress Catherine Jourdan was only brought on board three days before shooting began. The late Robbe-Grillet is still clearly haunted by the memory of the mesmerizing Jourdan during the interview and credits not only the success of the film to her but also states that the final film ultimately took its shockingly symmetrical shape around her.
Born in France just a couple of weeks before Halloween in 1948, Catherine Jourdan was one of the most beguiling and puzzling performers who came out of the French New Wave. The great Jean-Pierre Melville was the first filmmaker to capture her haunting and unforgettable face in his 1967 masterpiece Le Samourai but appearing in such an auspicious debut did little to forward her career. Jourdan appeared in a few features throughout the late sixties but her film career was all but stagnate by the time she received a call from Alain Robbe-Grillet (who recalled a night dancing with her at a Parisian nightclub a year or so before) to appear in the new color production he was mounting.
It is impossible to discuss Eden and After without focusing on the tour de force performance by the elusive Catherine Jourdan. She controls nearly every frame of the film and Robbe-Grillet's camera is clearly in love with her. Watching her performance today it is both baffling and troubling that she didn't have greater success after its release. While she appeared in a number of productions after Eden and After before her death in 2011, Jourdan was never again granted to the kind of role Robbe-Grillet granted her.Eden and After is the most 'painterly' film in Robbe-Grillet's iconic body of work. He admitted as much to Anthony Fragola in The Erotic Dream Machine by stating that, "there exist many references to painting in Eden and After-in particular a live reproduction of a famous painting by Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2." Duchamp, doppelgangers and an unnerving mathematical sense of structure guide Eden and After. Inspired by the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Robbe-Grillet used a chart her created of, "twelve recognizable themes", instead of any kind of traditional script to create Eden and After. As in all of his films Robbe-Grillet delights in destroying any sense of traditional narrative structure in Eden and After and it stands as one of the most authentically dreamy and hallucinatory films ever made...the viewer slips down the druggy rabbit hole with Jourdan and you will either want to escape or never emerge again.
A lot of credit for Eden and After's success has to go to cinematographer Igor Luther, the great Czech artist who had previously worked with Robbe-Grillet on The Man Who Lies. Luther's use of color in Eden and After is never less than jaw dropping and the color red has never been quite as seductive and sinister as it is here. Robbe-Grillet told Fragola that he loved Red because it, "is the color of blood", and, "all my films shot in color involve blood...so it is the color red that interests me."Eden and After, and its companion film N Took the Dice (also included on Redemption's new disc) stand as bold reminders to cinema's great visual power. Watching the film on this new disc reminded me of just how depressingly unimaginative most modern films are. Robbe-Grillet's films are a gob in the face to anyone who questions films place as great art. Pretentious? Absolutely and in the best possible way.
Redemption's new Blu-ray is light on extras and is missing the Tim Lucas commentary track and Catherine Robbe-Grillet found on the British release but having the stunning HD print alone is well worth the price of the disc. Eden and After stands as not only one of the great modern films but perhaps the most stunning example of Robbe-Grillet's unbelievably distinctive cinematic vision. It also stands as a great tribute to a young woman who should have had a more successful career as an actress. As Robbe-Grillet stated in The Erotic Dream Machine, Eden and After is ultimately the "story" of Catherine Jourdan, and what a endearing and profound tale that turned out to be.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

My friend Miranda's mom is running an Indie GoGo campaign to finance her neo-noir horror film IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT. The work, inspired by the likes of Dario Argento and Roman Polanski, looks very valuable and I would appreciate if everyone could possibly help out by sharing this link and, or, pledging. Thanks so much!

Friday, May 9, 2014

There is something downright heroic about Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Almost three decades after its initial release, Hooper’s daring follow-up to one of the most iconic American Independent films ever made can now be viewed as one of the bravest, most unconventional and most confrontational works of the eighties. A wildly subversive blood-soaked black comedy that lays to waste the conservative landscape of the Reagan fueled era, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a fully loaded work fueled by the visions of a combative and iconoclastic filmmaker, with something to prove, and an undervalued writer looking to chop away at what had become of the American dream.
Tobe Hooper should have been riding high by the mid-eighties. After all he had just achieved the biggest commercial and critical success of his career just a few years earlier with 1982’s Poltergeist but that success had been undercut by widespread rumors that it was more producer Steven Spielberg’s work than Hoopers. Struggling to regain his footing Hooper delivered two high-profile failures, that have since become fan favorites, Lifeforce (1985) and Invaders from Mars (1986) before he finally decided it was time to revisit the legendary film that had put him on the map in the first place.
The key to understanding The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in relation to its more acclaimed predecessor is to look at the very different times in which they were made. Even though just over a decade separated Hooper’s films the cinematic and social landscape had changed dramatically between 1974 and 1986. The audiences that had flocked to the first Chainsaw were still reeling from Watergate, Vietnam and the crushing realization that the sixties were indeed over. In contrast by the mid-eighties it was commerce and consumption that was on most Americans minds and film audiences were no longer interested in supporting the paranoid fueled individualistic works of the seventies. For a nonconformist like Tobe Hooper, this must have been a most bitter pill to swallow.
The man who had received worldwide acclaim just a couple of years before the premiere of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, for his award winning screenplay for Wim Wenders’ mesmerizing art-house classic Paris, Texas (1984) might have seemed an odd-choice for Hooper’s misunderstood sequel, but renegade L.M. Kit Carson was the absolute perfect pick. Like Hooper, Carson hailed from Texas and, like Hooper, he had come of age in the liberal freewheeling era of the seventies. The two were actually a match made in heaven (or hell, depending on your point of view). Art-house meets the Grindhouse…and, as driven by Carson’s words and Hooper’s direction, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 would indeed turn out to the kind of oddball avant-garde exploitation film that few creative minds could even hope to concoct. Of course they had to go through hell to get their peculiar vision on the screen; battling every step of the way with a company who pulled the financial rug out from their feet before the cameras had even rolled.
The entire behind the scenes struggles and turmoil are documented on Arrow’s astonishing new limited edition box-set dedicated to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Like many of cinema’s great films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a compromised work but Hooper and his tireless crew worked through the compromises and delivered just the kind of searing and unhinged picture they promised.
The majority of sequels we see today crowding our local corporate owned megaplexes are essentially just remakes or retreads of the films that they are following. It has kind of become the norm to accept this and it is that attitude that still makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 feel so downright revolutionary. Audiences expecting the chilling coldness of the first film will be shocked by the anarchic humor on display in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. It is an extremely funny film, thanks mostly to Jones multi-layered script and the demonic performances of both Dennis Hopper and especially Bill Moseley. Far from being just a ferociously funny and gory freak show though, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 also works as a frenetic fright film, even though it wisely never attempts to reach the terrifying highs of its predecessor.
If there is a clear thematic connection between the first Chainsaw and the second it can be found in Hooper’s decision to once again find a strong leading lady to guide the final act. Just as Marilyn Burns’ petrifying turn in the original helped give that extraordinary film the heart and soul it has the vastly underrated Caroline Williams, as the feisty D.J. Stretch, does the same for Hooper’s unexpected sequel. Williams is terrific in the film and gives a visceral, and at times oddly moving, performance that is the equal of Burns more well-known work.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was slapped with an X rating when it his theaters in 1986 due to its violent content and generally chaotic nature. Cannon films had no idea what to do with it and both critical and fan reaction was wildly mixed. The film would quickly become a fan favorite once it hit video and by the time MGM released their own special edition DVD a decade or so ago it had become a bona-fide cult classic to many, although it has never garnered the same amount of acclaim and attention that the first film has. Arrow’s new collection is tremendous and it ports over all of the excellent material from MGM’s disc. There is new content as well including an excellent retrospective documentary featuring “Still Feelin’ the Buzz” and, best of all, a bonus disc entitled The Early Films of Tobe Hooper, which features 2 incredibly rare late sixties works from the man (The Heisters and Eggshells) with an additional commentary and a fascinating interview. It is a truly terrific collection dedicated to a very valuable film and filmmaker.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 will never be granted the classic status of its more famous parent and, perhaps, that is fitting since the film was a bit like the unruly child few wanted. Hooper’s ferocious follow-up film had the misfortune (or perhaps fortune) to land in the cinematic dustbin that was American film in 1986 and many just won’t be able to separate it from a period when most of the renegade filmmakers of the seventies had either called it quits or sold out completely. Tobe Hooper would never again attempt to make something as wildly ambitious or challenging as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 but, ultimately, he didn’t have to because he had already given American cinema not one but two of its most defining films.
Jeremy Richey, 2014

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Progress on Issue 1 of Art Decades is continuing and I
am very happy to report that we are right on schedule. Thanks to our
successful Indiegogo campaign we have been able to get all the software
and equipment we needed for this new venture and, again, we are so
grateful to everyone that helped us out.
I have already received a
number of pieces for Issue 1 from our contributors and they are just as
compelling and fascinating as I knew they would be. We have also
conducted several interviews for Issues 1 and 2 and have more
scheduled.
On our creative end we are getting ready to take on two
more photo shoots this weekend for Issue 1 and we are very excited about
them. I am blessed to be surrounded by such creative and dedicated
artists.
Because we already have the cover stories for Issues 2 and
3 lined up there have been mumblings around our non-existent office
that we might get Issue 1 out earlier than November but that is just a
rumor as of right now. Officially our release date is still November
(and not any later) but we will see what happens...
Thanks to
everyone that has liked and followed our pages, ordered our products and
has just been all kinds of awesome in general. We really, really
appreciate it.

Friday, March 28, 2014

So, this is it! Less than twenty hours left in our Indiegogo campaign and we still have a number of great rewards available. Thank you all for the amazing response! We are all so grateful and blown away!

Monday, March 10, 2014

So it has been an incredibly busy last couple of weeks! For those who haven't been following the progress of Issue 1 of our upcoming print publication ART DECADES at our website, Facebook or Twitter pages here is a quick rundown.
Our Indiegogo campaign is almost two weeks in and we have been thrilled with the response. We are at almost 75% of our goal and all the support has been so appreciated! Fingers crossed we can make our goal before March 28th when the campaign ends.

We did our first photo shoot for Issue 1 and it was such an incredible and beautiful experience. I know you all are going to be blown away by the work that our photographer, Whitley Brandenburg, and make-up artist and model, Rhiannon Lake Mills, did. Here is a short behind the scenes video of the shoot.

I also had the pleasure of conducting a Skype interview with our first cover star Celia Rowlson-Hall for the feature I am writing for Issue 1.
Also, last week we had the great thrill of conducting our first in-person interview with one of our favorite bands CHAPPO! We spent about an hour chatting with these amazing guys and then caught their incredible show with Royal Teeth and Parade of Lights. Here is another behind the scenes video for you to enjoy.

Even though we are still in the early stages this has already been the most emotional and exciting experience of my creative life. I am so grateful for my team of Kelley, Lake and Whitley and am blown away by all the contributors we have lined up. The idea of sharing all their work this November brings me great, great joy.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

More than a decade before he mesmerized audiences with masterful works like The Decalogue (1988), The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colors Trilogy (1993-1994), Polish born filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski had mainly worked in the field of documentary shorts. While some of these shorts had been fictional works, it as a documentary filmmaker that Kieslowski had initially made his name, throughout his first full decade, as a director in the seventies.
Camera Buff (also known as Amateur) was not Kieslowski’s first feature-length narrative film (he had previously shot both The Scar and The Calm in 1976) but it was his first truly accomplished fictional work. Like his later more well-known works, including Blue (1993) and Red (1994), Camera Buff shows Kieslowski as a supremely gifted artist and storyteller and it remains a sometimes dazzling, if mostly subdued, opening chapter to one of the most important film careers of the modern era.
Relatively successful middle-class factory worker Filip Mosz and his wife have recently welcomed a newborn baby into their lives. Filip buys an 8mm film camera with the hopes of capturing his new child in the early stages of its life. What he thought would be an innocent hobby turns serious when his boss asks Filip to begin using the camera to film his company’s board meetings. Soon Filip has a film crew at his disposal and his once happy life is altered as he becomes more and more obsessed with the idea of capturing what is real, even if it means putting his marriage and career in jeopardy.Camera Buff is a significant film in not only Kieslowski’s career but also Polish film in general, as it manages to be not only a truly transcendent personal work but also a pointed political one, as it carefully criticizes the cloud of censorship that had hung over Kieslowski’s generation. Kieslowski shows the process for a young filmmaker to be a difficult one, as personal visions were often subjected unfairly to an outside authoritative hand.Camera Buff is, at its core, an extremely serious film but it contains the particular kind of wit and warmth that seems specific to certain Kieslowski works, like the often-undervalued White (1993). Few directors have ever come close to matching Kieslowski’s ability to get inside the spirit of a soul in transition and Filip, like Kieslowski’s greatest characters, is very much a man in crisis but by the film’s final frames, in which he bravely turns the camera on himself, he has had a very valuable and necessary spiritual breakthrough.
While it lacks the refinement of Kieslowski’s later films, Camera Buff is a beautifully composed work that shows the influential filmmaker stepping away from the grittiness of his early documentary style and into a more polished cinematic technique.

Camera Buff is ultimately about a man’s growth as a filmmaker and one can easily draw a parallel to Kieslowski’s own strides at the time. Camera Buff might be a transitional piece in Kieslowski’s career, but it is an undeniably important one.
Camera Buff wouldn’t completely solidify Kieslowski as one of the great filmmakers of his generation but it served as fair enough warning that, even at this early stage, he had qualities that few of his peers could match. While nowhere near as perfect as his triumphant run of final films, Camera Buff is a wonderfully rendered and moving work that acts as not only a meditation on the human condition but also cinema itself.

-Jeremy Richey, a rejected Directory of World Cinema piece from a few years back revised in 2014-

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Fans of Zoe Tamerlis Lund, Joe Delia and Abel Ferrara have certainly had to wait a very long time for the soundtrack release to their mesmerizing masterpiece Ms.45 but the wait I finally over. Delia's incredible score is now available to pre-order over at Death Waltz Recordings and Light in the Attic via a limited to 500 copies Vinyl edition. Hardcore fans will want to order directly from Death Waltz because they will get an instant free download of the score and over an hour of unused music from the film! I am listening to it right now and to say it was worth the wait is an understatement...it is absolutely incredible.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Only available for years via dreadful quality bootlegs, the classic films of the legendary Alain Robbe-Grillet are finally getting ready to land on American shores on Blu-Ray and DVD courtesy of Redemption's new The Cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet collection. The first two releases in the series, Trans-Europ-Express (1967) and Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) come out in early February and both are nothing short of spectacular. It is fitting that Redemption's first Robbe-Grillet release is his groundbreaking Trans-Europ-Express, a miraculous work that stands as a perfect gateway into the French renegade's most distinctive cinematic world. Alternately playful and subversive, Trans-Europ-Express is still an astonishingly forward thinking work detailing the complex, and often surprising, relationship between an author and his characters. Starring New-Wave icons Jean-Louis Trintignant and Marie-France Pisier as two characters being constructed right before our very eyes by Robbe-Grillet and his wife Catherine (both appearing as themselves), Trans-Europ-Express perhaps feels even more adventurous today than it did in the more openly confrontational and experimental sixties.
Like many of Robbe-Grillet's early literary works, Trans-Europ-Express manages to avoid the pretentious pitfalls of most deliberately self-reflexive post-modern works by maintaining a sharp wit throughout. While Trans-Europ-Express is rightfully grouped among the most serious European Art Films of the sixties it is also one of the funniest and Robbe-Grillet's delightful willingness to play with pre-conceptions of character, story and the filmmaking process is incredibly refreshing. It's among just a handful of films that makes you questions cinema's role while enhancing your enjoyment. Trans-Europ-Express was just the second film Robbe-Grillet had made as a director (with the 1963's mesmerizing The Immortal standing as the first) but he already had mastered the difficult task of translating many of the questions his novels posed into answers on the screen. As a filmmaker, Robbe-Grillet's daring framing skills and his dazzling use of space were already apparent in Trans-Europ-Express and in cinematographer Willy Kurant he found the perfect artist to help bring his black and white world of eroticism and intrigue to life, although the two wouldn't work together again. A lot of the credit for how successful Trans-Europ-Express is as an incredibly entertaining film, and not just an odd experiment, has to go to Robbe-Grillet's incredible stars, Trintignant and Pisier, whom both dive into this uncompromising material with an absolute gleefulness. Many actors would have shied away from some of the satirical self-poking that these two iconic stars are asked to perform in Trans-Europ-Express so it is to their credit, and the film's benefit, that they were so game.
Redemption's Blu-ray of Trans-Europ-Express is a thing of beauty. Mastered in HD from the original 35mm elements Kino and Redemption's team wisely didn't overly digitize this print and the silver grain necessary for its glorious black and white photography is still in place. It's truly lovely to finally see this film looking and sounding like this. Extras include a thirty minute chat with the much-missed Robbe-Grillet and a trailer reel. Sadly, the Tim Lucas commentary tracks that grace the international releases are absent but, otherwise, this is an absolutely essential release in every way. Pre-order it at Amazon.

Monday, January 20, 2014

When I decided this past October that I finally wanted to launch my first publication one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted the cover to be something incredibly special. Even before I came up with a name for the publication, ART DECADES, I knew that my first and only choice for our first cover star was a young filmmaker whose work has meant oh so much to me the past couple of years. So, I am incredibly excited to announce that the genius New York based actor, choreographer, director and writer Celia Rowlson-Hall will be appearing on the cover of Issue 1 of ART DECADES in a photo taken specifically for the publication. I will be writing a long piece on Celia's remarkable work and I am beyond honored and thrilled that she agreed to appear on the cover. I cannot possibly began to express my eternal gratitude. More information on ART DECADES is coming soon including a look at some of the contributors and more. Also keep a lookout for our IndieGoGo Crowdfunding campaign which will be starting in the next week or so.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

While a great many friends over at Facebook are already aware of this, I am very pleased to officially announce here that my wife Kelley and I will be releasing the first issue of our first printed publication in the late part of 2014. This, as of yet, untitled publication is still in the earliest stages of planning but Kelley and I are both extremely excited about it and we are going to make it something truly special. This will be a step by step process and will be a true learning experience for both Kelley and I, as we have never attempted anything like this.
While the details are being ironed out I can tell you that this will be a print only arts based publication allowing writers to write on topics of choosing. Obviously the journal will consist of a lot of writing on film but it will also incorporate literature, music, photography and so on. This will not be a 'review-based' publication (although certainly critiques can occur), but rather a platform for all types of writers to really flex their creative muscles and have a chance to get pieces in print that otherwise they might not be able to. Throughout 2014 I will mostly be utilizing Moon in the Gutter as an information base on the first issues progress. There will be other posts as well, and eventually a website will be set up for the journal, but I do want to share this journey with any who might be curious to follow. Here is an outline of our plan:

1. Gather together a number of our favorite writers and ask if they would be interested in submitting for the first issue. I am very excited to say that we have gathered close to twenty fabulous writers already with more coming on board as I type this. If you are interested in possibly submitting, please contact me at Facebook or via my Gmail. I will be introducing the writers here at Moon in the Gutter in the upcoming months as well as unveiling our fabulous first cover star!

2. Since this is a self-financed venture, Kelley and I will need some help regarding the software and a few other start-up expenses so we will be doing a Crowdfunding drive, probably via IndieGoGo. We are planning on launching this probably around late January and rewards will be offered. This is, obviously, a pivotal step, so any help (whether it be a donation or just spreading the word will be greatly appreciated).

3. As soon as we have the software in place and the pieces start coming in Kelley and I will spend the better part of 2014 putting the first issue together. Since, as I said, this is a totally new thing for us it will take time. Thankfully we already have a friend who is familiar with the program we are planning on using (AdobeInDesign) but we would, of course, love to hear from anyone who might have any advice, tips, or suggestions throughout the process.

4. PUBLISH!!! Initially Kelley and I had planned on printing this ourselves in a limited edition run and handling the shipping. We finally decided that the cost and time would be too much for us to handle so I am taking the lead from my good friends over at Weng's Chop and am planning on using Amazon's print on demand service CreateSpace. This will allow the journal to be sold at Amazon and Barnes and Noble's sites, as well as our own site, and it doesn't have to be a limited run. We are looking at the first issue as a break even proposition at best and we will try to make it as affordable as possible, while making sure that is as colorful and aesthetically pleasing as we are planning.

So that about does it. This has been a dream of mine since I first cracked open an issue of Video Watchdog in the early nineties and I promise we are going to deliver something very special. Hell, with the writers I have on board we could do an old school Xerox pamphlet and it would still be awesome but we are going to give you more than that. Wish us luck and enjoy, 'the first song on our new album.'

I am the editor and co-creator of the quarterly print only publication Art Decades as well as the author of the upcoming From Emmanuelle to Chabrol: Sylvia Kristel in the Seventies. I'm also the creator of a number of film and music blogs including Moon in the Gutter, Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience, The Sylvia Kristel Archives and Harry Moseby Confidential. I live in Colorado with my wife Kelley and our three dogs Maizie, Topper and Ziggy Pop.